Inside the Revitalization of Leiper's Fork Tennessee

This is a story of a place long forgotten, where once-thriving mom-and-pop stores sat vacant and neglected for decades. It's about a speck on the map with a funny name—Leiper's Fork, Tennessee—populated by a few hundred decent people, including three incredibly optimistic visionaries who refused to give up hope.

The Visionaries

The Visionaries

Aubrey Preston grew up in the knuckled Appalachian foothills of East Tennessee, where music flows out of the mountains like water and an omnipresent fog makes the craggy peaks appear to meet the clouds. It's the kind of place that can turn a boy into a dreamer. And, as dreamers do, Preston left in his 20s to explore the world beyond. This particular bit of geography, though, tends to tug its people back. Which is how Preston found himself, six years later, a successful real-estate magnate in Colorado who wanted nothing more than to return home.

In 1992, Preston settled his young family into a turn-of-the-century farmhouse about 30 miles south of Nashville. Leiper's Fork, however, was no manicured suburb — more like a country lane lined with a few falling-down buildings, remnants of the village's boom days a century ago, when the Middle Tennessee Railroad stopped here. But the trains quit running in 1927, and it was as if the village went to sleep. "You could see the makings of a city that never really developed," Preston recalls. "I just had a feeling this community could still blossom, in a way that allowed both the newcomers and the old-timers to win."

The Revitalization Begins

The Revitalization Begins

So he set out to wake up the town. Preston didn't get far before crossing paths with Marty and Bruce Hunt, who'd decamped to these parts in the '70s with a similar vision. Together, the three possessed the power to pull off a project of this scale. The Hunts brought their knowledge of Leiper's Fork—and the respect of its longtime residents—to the table, while Preston supplied serious funding. In the course of 18 months, he purchased several commercial buildings, a handful of decrepit historic houses, and some 2,100 acres of rolling land to protect it from overdevelopment. "I've seen that movie too many times," he explains. "Revitalizations can start out with a lot of idealism, then newcomers show up and the original charm is lost."

After the Hunts bought three more abandoned storefronts and enlisted their neighbors to pitch in, the Sisyphean task of renovating all the structures began. (Marty herself spent three months scrubbing caked motor oil off the floor of the 1914 general store.) When a building was finished, Preston and the Hunts listed it for no more than what they put into it. Creating the ultimate small-town utopia, not turning a profit, was the point.

In this photo: Once the sun sets in Leiper's Fork, you can often find the locals at Puckett's Grocery, playing music around the fire pit.